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Daily Bafflements
February 13, 2015
• Today in Labor Strikes: Workers at twenty-nine sea ports along the West Coast, from Bellingham to San Diego. Here’s a timeline of the long-running contract dispute. • Today in Billionaires: Bachelor billionaires, just in time for Valentine’s ...

The Well-Trod Path: Nick Kristof at Home
February 12, 2015
Having liberated the “better half” of the developing world from gender-based oppression and poverty, the New York Times’s fave do-gooder Nicholas Kristof and his trusty investment-banker sidekick Sheryl WuDunn have set their sights closer to home. Folks on the war-torn ...

Obama in the Land of the Blind
February 12, 2015
Last Friday the White House released its 2015 National Security Strategy, outlining President Obama’s vision for the future of national defense. It’s no surprise that there’s a lot of fluff in there. (“Our economy is the largest, most open, and most innovative in the ...

Daily Bafflements
February 12, 2015
• Your uncle with all the conspiracy theories are right; the Department of Homeland Security does have a secret “kill switch” for the Internet, and a D.C. court has just ruled that it can remain secret. • You may have seen the news this week that the vile ...

Trashing the University of Athens
February 11, 2015
Don’t get me wrong. Most of Athens is fairly clean. The subway stations are spotless. Trash is picked up and the streets are swept. But then you stumble across something like this: a hallway of the huge, nine-story School of Philosophy building in the University of Athens, ...

Your Snitching Gadgets
February 11, 2015
Your gadgets are spying on you. And not just in the ways you’ve become uncomfortably familiar with, like forking over personal information to the data-mining mill in return for ads for discount florists. A new generation of always-listening devices is now collecting ...

Daily Bafflements
February 11, 2015
• Oh, brands! Red Bull has filed an opposition with the Patent and Trademark Office against a little tiny craft brewery in Ashburn, Virginia called Old Ox Brewery. For trademark infringement. Red Bull argues “that an ox and a bull are ‘virtually indistinguishable ...

The Woman in the Room
February 10, 2015
Every woman who’s worked in an office knew that Sony co-chair Amy Pascal was going to lose her job. Though the announcement only came last week, we knew it was coming months ago, when the Sony hacks first hit and an unprecedented wave of stolen emails started flooding ...

Daily Bafflements
February 10, 2015
• Hey, you’re a busy businessman or woman, right? And you want to give your clients and customers the personal touch, but who has the time? Luckily, there is a new, thoughtful service called Bond that lets you text a robot to write people hand-written notes for you. ...

Media Misdeeds and Blind Spots
February 09, 2015
The “war on terror” is only the most recent threat used to rationalize our military’s extensive global footprint. The military and intelligence establishment possesses hundreds of military bases worldwide, making us the only country with permanently forward deployed ...

Veritas and Vineyards
February 09, 2015
What do the following two stories have in common? In Corrientes, Argentina, local residents were troubled by timber plantations that encroached on their small family farms, provided little economic opportunity for local workers, and disrupted the delicate ecological balance of ...

Daily Bafflements
February 09, 2015
• The blockbuster series by the New York Times uncovering the faces behind layers and layers of shady shell companies buying up elite real estate in New York is a must-read. The first part of the series unpacks the owners of the condos at the Time Warner Center, from reality ...